The key issue in Moussaoui's sentencing trial has been his failure to disclose his terrorist ties to federal agents when he was arrested in August 2001 on immigration violations. He is the only person ever charged in this country in connection with al-Qaida's attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

Both sides agree Moussaoui lied to the FBI, but they differ on what Moussaoui was legally obliged to do given the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against self-incrimination.

Prosecutors argue that once Moussaoui agreed to talk to federal agents, he was required to tell the truth - to confess his ties to al-Qaida and his plans to fly an airplane into the White House.

The defense argues Moussaoui was not required to confess.

The issue is crucial because, to obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove that federal agents would have prevented at least one death on Sept. 11 if Moussaoui had not lied. Their case would be much easier if that means Moussaoui also was obligated to disclose his al-Qaida membership and terrorist training.

Brinkema made her comments as she rejected a defense motion for a mistrial. Moussaoui's lawyers were angry because they believed a question from prosecutor David Novak implied to the jury that Moussaoui had an obligation to speak to FBI agents even after Moussaoui had invoked his right to a lawyer two days into questioning by the FBI. Agents immediately stopped questioning him at that point.

Brinkema said she did not feel a mistrial was warranted because she struck Novak's question from the record as soon as he asked it.

The issue developed as the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui testified he suspected the student pilot from France was a terrorist, but that Moussaoui's lies sent agents on "wild goose chases" away from his links to al-Qaida and
Osama bin Laden.

Harry Samit testified the lies sent agents futilely searching London - the home listed on Moussaoui's passport - for associates he claimed had given him money, but that Moussaoui never mentioned the alias used by Ramzi Binalshibh, an al-Qaida operative, to wire him cash from Germany.

The 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent did not admit getting money from that operative for almost four years - not until he pleaded guilty last April to conspiring with al-Qaida to fly planes into U.S. buildings.

The jury here will decide whether that guilty plea will put Moussaoui to death or imprison him for life.

Over objections by court-appointed defense lawyer Edward MacMahon, prosecutor Novak asked Samit one by one about Moussaoui's admissions last April and whether he gave any hint of them in 2001. Each time the answer was no.

What if Moussaoui had admitted in 2001 that he was an al-Qaida member who had pledged obedience to bin Laden?

"I would have asked additional questions about his role in al-Qaida and his relation to Osama bin Laden. It would have opened up a whole world of questions," replied Samit, a counterterrorism specialist.

"The answers dictate the logical course of the interview," said Samit, who arrested Moussaoui in Minnesota on Aug. 16, 2001, for immigration violations. "You can't ask logical follow-up questions if he provides misleading answers. It takes you down all sorts of alleys - wild goose chases, essentially."

Samit said that during his initial 90-minute interview of Moussaoui, Moussaoui claimed he was taking commercial flight training lessons in Minnesota "for enjoyment and his own personal ego." Moussaoui claimed the more than $32,000 in cash he brought into the United States was savings from work in an export-import business and from friends and associates.

Agents pressed Moussaoui for the names of the friends and associates who supplied the cash and for a day he supplied only a single name, "Taleal." When Moussaoui a day later said Taleal was Akhmed Atef, Samit immediately asked bureau agents in London to search for that man because the only foreign address they had for Moussaoui was in London.

Samit immediately became suspicious of Moussaoui when executives of a flight school in suburban Minneapolis reported a foreign student training to fly a Boeing 747-400 despite having almost no pilot experience.

One of the flight school's instructors testified he urged his bosses to call the FBI after his new student responded angrily to innocent questions about his religion and paid for his training in $100 bills.

Instructor Clarence Prevost told the jury he first assumed Moussaoui was a rich guy "just fulfilling a dream."

But on the first day of class, when Moussaoui, asked whether he was a Muslim, responded with a terse "I am nothing," Prevost became suspicious.

"I said, 'Should we be doing this?'" Prevost told the court. "'We don't know anything about this guy and we're teaching him to throw the switches on a (Boeing) 747.'"

A Pakistani linked to that Manila plot, and also to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency may still be at large. The security officer charges a U.S. cover-up of possible involvement by the Pakistani ISI in the 9/11/01 attack on the Trade Towers. Although given these same leads, the Official 9/11 Commission failed to investigate them.

This past December, Sam Karmilowicz finished a 21-year career as an officer in the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Back in 1994 he was working as an Assistant Regional Security Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, when John D. Negroponte was the ambassador. These days, Negroponte is the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

On the morning of September 18, 1994, Karmilowicz recalls, "the U.S. embassy received a telephone call from an anonymous person (who spoke with a distinct middle eastern accent) concerning his knowledge of an assassination plot against President William Clinton, who was scheduled to visit Manila that coming November."

The embassy switchboard relayed that and a subsequent call to Karmilowicz, and the caller provided him the name of a Pakistani businessman, Tariq Javed Rana, as being one of the leaders of the plot. The source told Karmilowicz that Rana was facilitating the importation of explosives and operatives into the Philippines to complete the mission by paying bribes to Philippine government officials of the Immigration and Customs bureaus. He said the bribes were paid in counterfeit U.S. currency.

The first call was promptly reviewed in the embassy that same day by members of the embassy emergency action committee (EAC) chaired by Raymond Burghardt, the Deputy in Charge of Mission under Negroponte. The FBI, Secret Service, CIA, DEA, and DIA were all members of the committee. At the conclusion of the EAC meeting, embassy law enforcement and intelligence officials were instructed to inform the Philippine authorities and to initiate an investigation to determine the credibility of the threat. (Burghardt went on to become US ambassador to Vietnam and now heads the East-West Center, based in Honolulu.)

"A few weeks afterwards", Karmilowicz says, " high ranking officers of the CIA and Secret Service came into my office and informed me that they had conducted an investigation concerning the threat and concluded that the allegations against the Pakistani, Rana, were a hoax in order to have the police harass him. They offered no motive or information as to why such a 'hoax' would be perpetrated or who might be behind it.

"While all this was going on, I was supervising and managing the embassy's surveillance detection unit responsible for the security of our housing compounds and annexes, including looking for suspicious persons or activity. I was also assigned the task of coordinating and providing protective security arrangements for visiting dignitaries and VIPs. As such, I had a professional responsibility to know whether the Pakistani suspect, and or any of his accomplices, was a credible threat against U.S. persons and/or interests in the Philippines. "The U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies may have dismissed this intelligence data as a hoax while secretly following up the leads ... or they may just have been incompetent and let the future 9-11 terrorist masterminds slip through their fingers. Either way, they seem to have been incompetent because, if they were secretly monitoring these suspected (later confirmed) terrorists, then they obviously did a poor job of it."

A few days before that first call, the Pakistani man named in the plot, Tariq Rana, had been featured in the Philippine press, which reported that he was a suspect in an illegal drug manufacturing ring. In response to these allegations, the public affairs section of the Pakistani embassy in Manila issued a number of statements vigorously denying the allegations against their national, claiming that he was a law-abiding citizen and a close relative of members of Pakistan's parliament and military establishment. Shortly after he issued these statements the Pakistani public affairs officer was recalled to Pakistan.

President Clinton arrived in Manila on November 12, 1994, and his two-day visit passed without incident. Then, one week before Pope John Paul II's visit to Manila in mid-January, 1995, police claimed a fire occurred in Room 603 of the Dona Josefa apartment building in Manila and that they discovered bomb-making chemicals and other evidence during a search of the apartment. Several people of Middle Eastern origin were staying in the apartment at the time of the fire and one of these persons was later identified as Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber. Yousef is the nephew of Khaled Shaikh Muhammad, who was arrested in 2003. Muhammad subsequently disclosed under interrogation that he had planned the 9/11 attacks with Yousef in Manila at that time.

Ramzi Yousef fled the Philippines immediately after the apartment fire, and was arrested in Pakistan a month later. In 1998, Agence France Press (AFP) reported that Yousef confessed to federal authorities while in prison that he had in fact planned to assassinate Clinton when the president was visiting the Philippines but gave up because of tight security. Secret Service sources also report that large sums of counterfeit U.S. currency were entering the Philippines during the time of the plot. Clearly, the information passed to Karmilowicz was accurate and not a hoax as claimed by the CIA and Secret Service.

In conjunction with the fire at Yousef's apartment, the Philippine press also reported that a similar fire occurred at the business establishment of Tariq Rana. An article in the Manila Chronicle indicated that the police found the same chemicals in both fires - chemicals that are used to make nitroglycerin. Yousef used nitroglycerin to bomb Philippines Airlines Flight 434 on December 11, 1994 as a test run for the so-called "Bojinka"plot. The explosion tore out a two square foot portion of the fuselage and ripped almost in half the body of 24-year old Haruki Ikegami, a Japanese businessman occupying the seat under which the bomb was placed. The bomb used on Flight 434 had one-tenth the power of the bombs he planned to use in the first phase of his Bojinka project, which was to simultaneously bomb 11 American aircraft over the Pacific Ocean.

Rana was arrested in April 1995 by Philippine authorities and charged with business fraud, although his current whereabouts are unknown.

Not all the Al Qaeda operatives successfully escaped arrest following the January 6, 1995 fire at the Dona Josefa apartment building.

According to Peter Lance's book Cover Up, Ramzi Yousef instructed one of his accomplices, Abdul Hakim Murad, to return to Dona Josefa during the early morning hours on the day of the fire to retrieve his laptop computer, which contained all the details of the Bojinka plot, plus other incriminating information. The Philippine police, who had staked out the building, subsequently arrested Murad and transported him to Camp Crame, the headquarters of the Philippine National Police Intelligence Group (PNP). During the period of Murad's captivity, Lance says Murad "was harshly treated, perhaps even tortured, forced to ingest massive quantities of water".

Murad remained in Philippine custody until on or about May 11, 1995, when he was rendered to the U.S. to face criminal charges. However, before the rendition, the U.S. embassy sent Karmilowicz to Camp Crame to pick-up an envelope containing evidence that the PNP had collected from Murad. Upon his return to the embassy, Karmilowicz was instructed to transcribe the chain of evidence and to express mail the materials to a U.S. Justice Department Office in New York City. Mike Garcia and Dietrich Snell, the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who prosecuted Murad, almost certainly had access to the materials that Agent Karmilowicz sent to the Justice Department, although it is unknown what, if anything, was done with the evidence.

Pakistan's ISI and, indirectly, the CIA had much closer ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda than the American public was allowed to know. It is common knowledge that Osama bin Laden may be hiding in the rugged Pakistani mountains bordering Afghanistan. However, most Americans probably are not aware or do not remember that major al Qaeda players Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaik Mohammed were both hiding in Pakistan when they were captured in 1995 and 2003, respectively, as was Mir Aimal Kasi, the assassin who attacked CIA employees in their cars outside CIA headquarters in Langley, VA in 1993.

Pakistan had been playing a double game until the events of September 11 forced the situation. Pakistan had supported the rise of the Taliban in the power vacuum left by the departure of the Soviet occupation army at the end of the 1980s. Pakistan supported and even used al Qaeda terrorist training camps to train its own operatives for use in the Kashmir dispute. There are other examples of Pakistan's possible links to terrorism and infiltration of the ISI by al Qaeda, such as the alleged funneling of money from ISI director General Ahmad Mehmoud to 9/11's Mohammed Atta. The Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi, Pakistan while he was investigating these al Qaeda-ISI links.

Karmilowicz went on from his tour of duty on Manila to Washington, then Beirut, and a later posting in Quito, Ecuador, where he was involved in a fracas which resulted in the death of an Ecuadorian national. Exonerated after a State Department investigation he served in Washington, finally leaving the service at the end of 2005.

During the spring of 2004, Karmilowicz says, "I contacted Maria Ressa, the CNN Jakarta Bureau Chief after I read a book that she published in December 2003 entitled Seeds of Terror. According to her research, the Pakistani suspected of plotting to kill President Clinton was a close associate of Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed during the time that these persons were hatching the plot to use airline carriers as missiles to attack the U.S." Ressa also told Karmilowicz that her sources in the Philippine intelligence and police bureaus suspected that this Pakistani was an associate of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The story has often been told of how a smoky accident in Yousef's apartment happened to draw police attention, and though Yousef escaped, his laptop provided disclosed that this attacks were nearly ready for execution.

The story is true as far as it goes, she told Karmilowicz, but the Philippine authorities were not quite so asleep at the wheel. The explosion aboard Philippine Airlines flight 434 had placed the police on heightened alert with the pope's visit just a few weeks away. Yousef had called the Associated Press, claiming that Abu Sayyaf was responsible, which suggests Filipino suspects, but Avelino "Sonny" Razon of the Presidential Security Group (PSG) tasked with security for the pope's visit was tipped to watch for Middle Easterners. "The PNP (Philippine National Police), particularly the PSG ,was on heightened alert because in December 1994, we received reports that a group of Middle Eastern personalities would be coming over to the Philippines to assassinate the Pope," Razon said. "The PSG had one man in particular under surveillance -- Tareq Javed Rana, a Pakistani suspected of supporting international terrorists with drug money. They were on the right track. He was a close associate of Ramzi Yousef. While under surveillance, Rana's house in Paranque, a suburb of Manila, burned down. An official police report would later say the PSG believed the "conflagration was caused by combustible chemicals such as those used for making an improvised explosive device [IED]."

Ressa's book suggested that the PNP did not begin its surveillance of Rana until December 1994, several months after the U.S. embassy had alerted the Philippine authorities that Rana was named as a suspect to assassinate President Clinton. This raises the question: why wasn't Rana investigated earlier; or, if he was investigated, why do certain people now want to deny this?

In 2004, Karmilowicz and his attorney contacted Richard Ben-Veniste of the official 9/11 Commission, suggesting that the leads from 1994 about Rana pointed to possible ISI complicity and that these leads be followed up. But the Commission never called him to testify.

These days, Karmilowicz (living in Alexandria, VA, and seeking a security job in a Fortune 500 firm), is scathing about the conduct of the interagency taskforce in the U.S. embassy in Manila.

What I think this story reveals is that the 9-11 Commission and the U.S. government deliberately withheld information from the U.S. public (and everyone else for that matter) that linked Al Qaeda operatives to persons who had close ties to Pakistani government officials, including members of Pakistan's ISI. One can only guess whether that was to save embarrassment or to hide illegal conduct.

One thing is for certain, i.e., the FBI, Secret Service, and CIA have deceived, and continue to deceive, the public concerning Rana's connection to Al Qaeda and the facts regarding the 9-11 attack.

One of the standouts in this spin of lies is Neil Herman, a former FBI official who was involved in the Bojinka investigation and a former supervisor of the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force in New York. Herman was quoted in an August 5, 2004 New York Times article entitled, Qaeda Strategy is Called Cause for New Alarm by Eric Lipton and Benjamin Weiser, which reported:

Even though the large-scale jetliner attack over the Pacific never happened, it is clear that the elaborate planning was an unappreciated warning of the sophistication and determination of the terrorists.

"It showed the government back in the mid-1990's how detail-oriented these individuals were," said Mr. Herman, the former FBI official, who was involved in the Bojinka investigation. "It also showed that there was an active network, although, of course, we were unable to determine the extent of the network back then."

Another prominent figure suspected of quashing the truth is Dietrich L. Snell, the Senior Counsel and Team Leader of the Official 9-11 Commission. Peter Lance writes extensively in his books Cover Up and 1000 Years for Revenge about Snell's shenanigans in cherry-picking evidence and excluding credible witness testimony, including information collected by the Defense Department's Able Danger Unit concerning pre-9/11 sightings of Mohammed Atta, one of the nineteen suspected hijackers. These allegations are now resurfacing in the news. The Associated Press (AP) reported on February 15, 2005 that U.S. Representative Curt Weldon, the vice Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee advised the public that the Able Danger Unit had identified Atta more than a dozen times before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Weldon also reportedly said the secret team found "a problem" in Yemen two weeks before the deadly Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in 2000, of which the ship commander was not told. Former (unidentified) members of the 9/11 Commission reportedly dismissed Weldon's findings.

My experience in the Philippines also appears to overlap Snell's involvement in the Murad case that Snell prosecuted. The Cooperative Research 9-11 Timeline (www.cooperativeresearch.org) contains a very peculiar account entitled: Early 1998:Prosecutors Turn Down Deal That Could Reveal Bojinka Third Plot.

The entry said: "Abdul Hakim Murad, a conspirator in the 1995 Bojinka plot with Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Shaik Mohammed, and others, was convicted in 1996 of his role in the Bojinka plot. He is about to be sentenced for that crime. He offers to cooperate with federal prosecutors in return for a reduction in his sentence, but prosecutors turn down his offer. Dietrich Snell, the prosecutor who convicted Murad, says after 9-11 that he doesn't remember any such offer. But court papers and others familiar with the case later confirmed that Murad does offer to cooperate at this time. Snell claimed he only remembers hearing that Murad had described an intention to hijack a plan and fly it into the CIA headquarters. However, in 1995 Murad had confessed to Philippine investigators that this would have been only one part of a larger plot to crash a number of airplanes into prominent U.S. buildings, including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a plot that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed later adjusts and turns in the 9-11 plot. While Philippine investigators claim this information was passed on to U.S. intelligence, it's not clear just which U.S. officials may have learned this information and what they did with it, if anything. [New York Daily News, 9/25/01] Murad is sentenced in May 1998 and given life in prison plus 60 years. [Albany Times Union, 9/22/02] After 9-11, Snell goes on to become Senior Counsel and a team leader for the 9-11 Commission. Author Peter Lance later calls Snell "one of the fixers, hired early on to sanitize the Commission's final report." Lance says Snell ignored evidence presented to the Commission that shows direct ties between the Bojinka plot and 9-11, and in so doing covers up Snell's own role in the failure to make use of evidence learned from Murad and other Bojinka plotters. [FrontPage Magazine, 1/27/05].

I know who the intelligence officials were at the U.S. embassy at the time of Murad's arrest and interrogation. These are the same officials who discounted the threat information I received about Rana. Do these people have something to hide? You bet they do!

Peter Lance was entirely correct when he told CNN anchor Lou Dobbs in a December 5, 2005 interview that the 9-11 Commission was essentially "a whitewash" and that it intentionally limited its investigation to 1996-forward. He said the Commission moved the plot's origin "to 1996 from 1994"and in so doing omitted information that linked Mohammed Atta to the terrorists responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Lance said Congress should put Dietrich Snell under oath to find out why the 9-11 staffer prevented the Able Danger information from getting to the 9-11 Commission.

Clearly, the 9-11 Commission's decision to use 1996 as the date that the 9-11 plot originated was also designed to omit the information that I obtained concerning Tariq Rana, and the connection he had with the Al Qaeda operatives who conceived the 9-11 plot.

Given these revelations, how can the American public trust a government that has rationalized its own failure to protect this nation by implementing draconian measures (e.g. the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping, and abductions and torture) - measures that have stripped its citizens of the rights and protections for which this country was founded. And what have these measures bought us but a seemingly endless war of attrition with an adversary that grows stronger and more lethal everyday.

Karmilowicz says, "my experience in the Philippines shows the U.S. government has compartmentalized information, not so much to protect sources and methods of an investigation or intelligence operation, but in order to cover-up its gross incompetence or its complicity in illegal and questionable activities conducted by, or against, foreign powers."

At some point, (most likely after President Clinton concluded his visit to the Philippines) the CIA and Secret Service realized that Rana and his associates were a threat after all, but they kept this information from Agent Karmilowicz.

Karmilowicz says, "Keeping that information to themselves is a breach of the no-double-standard policy [where one agency can't respond to a perceived threat without notifying the other agencies and the American public]."

And even worse, Karmilowicz believes, "this breach of policy has now become the norm in the post 9-11 world, whereby the State Department has now been co-opted by CIA and the Defense Department to allow people to be abducted and killed rather than apprehended. In one case I suspect that because information was compartmentalized, an attack may have been allowed to proceed ­ in Jeddah in December 2004, ­ and five people were killed." [See Counter Punch 'The Origins of the Rendition Program: Does the CIA Have the Right to Break Any Law, January 2006]. Karmilowicz likes to remind us how John Negroponte, the former Chief of Mission in the Philippines, who directed and approved the efforts of the various agencies at post, "was rewarded for his complicity in this cover-up, appointed the Director of National Intelligence, the person who approves secret renditions, eavesdropping, and the abduction and assassination of terrorist suspects".

Karmilowicz cites AP's Mathew Barakat and Peter Yost as reporting that Rob Spencer, the U.S. prosecutor in the Moussaoui trial in federal court in Alexandria, gave an opening statement to the jury in which he claimed that if Moussaoui had come clean -- i.e., informed the law enforcement establishment of his knowledge of the 9-11 plot -- in 2001, the FBI would have been able to use his records to locate 11 of the 19 September 11 hijackers, including all four pilots. Spencer also said the government would have kept those conspirators off airplanes and would have altered airport screeners to confiscate small knives and boxcutters. "Who in their right mind", Karmilowicz says, "would believe such a statement given what I observed and experienced in the Philippines?"

The charges stem from a complaint filed by a lawyer who watched over the recount on behalf of two third-party presidential candidates.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason removed himself from the investigation because his office represents the elections board. Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter was appointed special prosecutor.

Maiden, now the board's elections coordinator, was the director of the elections division during the recount in December 2004.

Two other board workers, Rosie Grier and Kathleen Dreamer, were indicted in August and scheduled for trial May 8. Dreamer was the manager of the board's ballot department and Grier was an assistant manager.

Baxter said he has filed a motion to have all three cases consolidated.

All three employees continue to work at the board.

"We're in the process of converting to the electronic voting, and we need our best people," board chairman Bob Bennett said. "We've moved them from any responsibility of recount or responsibility of ballots."

The board released a statement defending the workers.

"These allegations are based on interpretation of procedures, not on any suggestion of fraud. ... We are confident that no employee of the Board of Elections would knowingly or negligently engage in any unlawful conduct regarding the 2004 Presidential Recount," the statement read.

___

Information from: The Plain Dealer, http://www.cleveland.com

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said that while "re-programming isn't the phrase I would use", the idea would be considered as it had been implemented successfully in Europe, the Middle East and Indonesia.

"Those governments have made an attempt to persuade extremists and terrorists who have been held in prison to change their point of view and to understand that it's not the Islamic way to kill, it's not the Islamic way to murder," he told reporters.

"And in some cases that process has been successful. It's something that we will give thought to."

Police chief Keelty told ABC Television's Lateline programme Wednesday the process, which he likened to treatment for drug addicts, had been successful in countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Britain.

Indonesia's anti-terrorist squad now had former Jemaah Islamiah (JI) commander Nasir bin Abbas working for them and re-educating arrested JI recruits, he said.

"It's somebody they would have otherwise looked up to as a natural leader, in terms of a terrorist, and they've turned him around and used him to convert the others," Keelty said.

Indonesia had convicted around 200 people of terrorist-related offences since the 2002 Bali bombings and something had to be done with those offenders before they could be released back into the community, he said.

"Two hundred people incarcerated presents a problem if they haven't been reformed by the time they come back out into the community."

Australian police have worked closely with their Indonesian counterparts in the investigation of JI bomb attacks against tourists on the resort island of Bali and against the Australian embassy in Jakarta.

Keelty said he had raised the idea with the government in Australia, where 24 Muslim men are facing terrorism charges, but it would require a major policy shift and had gone no further.

"Essentially, it would be a threshold question in terms of policy as to whether we would engage in something that forces people into some sort of de-programming or de-radicalisation," he said.

Australian Council for Civil Liberties spokesman Terry O'Gorman opposed the plan.

"These countries the police commissioner mentions are involved in torture," O'Gorman said. "This de-programming is part of the same basket of procedures."

O'Gorman said there was no evidence to suggest that the practice, which he said was better described as "brainwashing", was effective in deterring terrorism.

Australian Muslim Civil Rights Advocacy Network spokesman Waleed Kadous, however, said a voluntary scheme had merit.

"It's important to highlight that already many respected scholars in the Muslim community are informally deconstructing terrorism and condemning terrorism to their congregations already," Kadous said.

"If it's voluntary we have no objection to it, but the problem once you make it compulsory is it just won't work, because religious leaders who do so will be seen as instruments of the government and will lose credibility to those people."

MADRID, Spain (March 10) - A two-year probe into the Madrid train bombings concludes the Islamic terrorists who carried out the blasts were homegrown radicals acting on their own rather than at the behest of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, two senior intelligence officials said.

Spain still remains home to a web of radical Algerian, Moroccan and Syrian groups bent on carrying out attacks - and aiding the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq - a Spanish intelligence chief and a Western official intimately involved in counterterrorism measures in Spain told The Associated Press.

The intelligence chief said there were no phone calls between the Madrid bombers and al-Qaida and no money transfers. The Western official said the plotters had links to other Islamic radicals in Western Europe, but the plan was hatched and organized in Spain. "This was not an al-Qaida operation," he said. "It was homegrown."

Both men spoke on condition of anonymity, the first because Spanish security officials are not allowed to discuss details of an ongoing investigation and the second due to the sensitive nature of his job.

The attack has been frequently described as al-Qaida-linked since a man who identified himself as Abu Dujan al-Afghani and said he was al-Qaida's "European military spokesman," claimed responsibility in a video released two days later.

Ahead of Saturday's anniversary of the March 11, 2004 blasts - which killed 191 people and wounded 1,500 - victims' groups have been clamoring for more progress in the investigation.

Gabriel Moris, whose 30-year-old son died in the bombings, said: "These past two years have done nothing to clear up what happened. My questions are simple: Who ordered the massacre? Who killed my son and the other innocent victims?"

The intelligence official said authorities know more than they have revealed, including the suspected ideological and operational masterminds of the attack.

"We haven't explained it well enough to the victims because we can't reveal judicial secrets," he said, adding the investigation is nearly complete.

Authorities believe the ideological mastermind was Serhan Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, a Tunisian who blew himself up along with six other suspects when police surrounded their apartment three weeks after the bombings, and that Jamal Ahmidan, a Moroccan who also died that day, was the "military planner."

Law enforcement had focused on another man, Allekema Lamari, as the head of the group. But the official said evidence, particularly from wiretapped phone conversations, indicated it was Ahmidan who gave the military orders. Lamari also died in the apartment blast in a Madrid suburb as authorities closed in.

Some 116 people have been arrested in the bombings, and 24 remain jailed. At least three others - Said Berraj, Mohammed Belhadj and Daoud Ouhane - are sought by authorities, though all are believed to have fled Spain long ago. The intelligence official said the top planners are all either dead or in jail.

While the plotters of the Madrid attack were likely motivated by bin Laden's October 2003 call for attacks on European countries that supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there is no evidence they were in contact with the al-Qaida leader's inner circle, the intelligence official said.

Most of the plotters were Moroccan and Syrian immigrants, many with criminal records in Spain for drug trafficking and other crimes. They paid for explosives used in the attack with hashish.

That is a far cry from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States - allegedly planned by al-Qaida leaders like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh and funded directly by the terror network through international wire transfers and Islamic banking schemes.

Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, said the model used in Madrid, and likely for the July 7 London transport bombings fits in well with al-Qaida's business plan.

"Al-Qaida is not and never was a topdown organization that did everything in terms of attacks around the world. They have a key role in ideological terms ... but they rely on local cells and those that are inspired to carry out these attacks," he said.

After the fact, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri are happy to claim responsibility because they recognize the carnage as inspired by their movement.

Still, Wilkinson cautioned that just because no direct link has been established between the Madrid plotters and al-Qaida, it doesn't mean none exists. "If security officials knew everything that was going on, we would have caught Osama bin Laden by now," he said.

Both the Spanish intelligence chief and the Western official said there is reason for concern despite the lack of a direct al-Qaida connection.

"There were a lot of moving parts to the March 11 plot, but we were still not able to detect it, and that is scary because a similar thing could happen again," said the Western counterterrorism official. "Since March 11, there have been plans for other significant attacks that the Spanish have disrupted."

Those plans include a scheme in late 2004 to bomb buildings in Barcelona, including the 1992 Olympic village and office towers known as the city's World Trade Center complex. Police also thwarted a 2004 plot by Moroccan and Algerian militants to level Madrid's National Court - a hub for anti-terror investigations - with a 1,100-pound truck bomb.

And agents specializing in Islamic terrorism have arrested dozens of suspects - all allegedly working to recruit potential suicide bombers for the Iraq insurgency.

At least two Spanish citizens - including March 11 suspect Mohammed Afalah - are believed to have blown themselves up in Iraq, and an investigation by the respected El Pais daily revealed some 80 others have traveled to the country in recent months intending to do the same.

The intelligence official said the March 11 attacks were a wakeup call, and authorities are much better prepared now to stop Islamic terrorism. But he said the bombings show how easy it is for those bent on terrorism to carry out attacks.

He said authorities believe the Madrid bombers learned how to construct the bombs - all connected to Mitsubishi Trium T110 mobile phones - from Internet sites linked to radical Islamic groups. The devices were similar to ones used in the 2002 Bali bombing, he said, evidence that militants in both countries got information on the same radical Web sites.

Spanish authorities were monitoring several of the bombers in the months before the attack - and actually stopped Ahmidan's car on a highway in late February, unaware he was leading a caravan of other terrorists transporting the explosives used in the blasts.

The intelligence official said authorities had never imagined a group of petty drug traffickers were capable of planning such a massive attack.

"Had we been told a day before (the bombing) that this is what was going on, we would have dismissed it," he said.

So far this year, 11 Canadian soldiers have been injured in Afghanistan and two have died. As well, a bombing in Kandahar City on Jan. 15 killed Foreign Affairs official Glyn Berry.

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- Murphy's aunt fears for own son -

Murphy's aunt, Eva Skeffington, disagrees with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision that there will be no parliamentary debate on the future of Canada's role in Afghanistan.

Skeffington's son, Dale Newbury, is a military mechanic who served in Afghanistan last year and is scheduled to head back to Kandahar in August.

More than 2,000 Canadians will be deployed near Kandahar this year, but Skeffington thinks Canada should instead be withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan.

"I can't imagine my son going over there and then not coming back," said Skeffington, as she fought back tears.

"They did go at first for peace and now it's war. I really don't agree with them being there. It's our sons and daughters."

While Murphy's family has opposed Canada's participation in the Afghanistan effort, others in his home community of Conception Harbour disagree.

"The troops are there. We made a commitment," said Jack Gushue, who intends to build a monument to Murphy in the small town.

"Canadians - and Newfoundlanders especially - once we commit, we are determined to do what we want to do."

"We anticipate that we are going to see a fairly violent spring and summer and then an improvement in overall conditions," he told the House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia.

The 26-member NATO alliance is preparing to expand its International Security Assistance Force mission -- already in the north, west and the capital Kabul -- to the more volatile south and ultimately the east, raising its troop numbers to 16,000 from 9,000.

Some 23,000 U.S. troops in the country are targeting Taliban and al Qaeda forces. U.S.-led forces in 2001 overthrew Taliban rulers who had harbored the al Qaeda network responsible for the September 11 attacks, but failed to extinguish the radical Islamic movement and its al Qaeda allies.

An insurgency that has killed more than 1,500 people since the start of last year has intensified in recent months with a wave of suicide bombings.

Moeller played down the strategic threat posed by al Qaeda, the Taliban and other insurgent groups.

"The overall trend line, though, is positive despite the fact that the data is what the data is with regard to U.S. forces who have been killed in the recent past compared to the first couple years," he told the subcommittee.

Moeller described al Qaeda, its allied Taliban remnants and two other groups as "patient, hidden and dangerous" opponents of the U.S.-led coalition troops and the 26,000-strong Afghan army.

The Taliban "appeared tactically stronger on the battlefield this year and they demonstrate an increased willingness to use suicide bomber and IED (improvised explosive device) tactics," he said.

"The Taliban do not have capability to exercise control over large areas of Afghanistan, but they are disruptive to reconstruction and reconciliation efforts," said the admiral.

Another foe, the Taliban-linked Haqqani Tribal Network, was the "most tactically proficient" insurgent group but its goal was limited to gaining autonomy in eastern Afghanistan and among tribesmen in Pakistan, Moeller said.

A third al Qaeda affiliate, the Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin was heavily involved in narcotics smuggling and "more of a mafia-like organization than an insurgent movement with national goals," he said.

1. Blueprint for Imperialism
2. Operation Imperialism, The 'Enduring' Mission
3.Appendix: Signatories to Rebuilding America's Defenses1. BLUEPRINT FOR IMPERIALISM

A superpower does not have moral imperatives. It has strategic imperatives. Its purpose is not to sustain the lives of other people, but to sustain itself. George Monbiot, The Moral Myth, 25.11.03.

The 19^th century's definitive treatise was Das Kapital (1848) by Karl Marx. The 20^th century had two major expositions of principles. Adolf Hitler published Eine Abrechnung (A Reckoning) in 1925, and Die Nazionalosozialistische Bewegung (the National-Socialistic Movement) in 1926. Together, these books became known as Mein Kampf (My Struggle). In 1964, The People's Republic of China published The Little Red Book, an iconic collection of quotations from the speeches and publications of Mao Tse Tung.

The 20^th century ended with a blueprint for imperialism - not a book, but a website called The Project for the New American Century.

"We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.²" PNAC Statement of Principles, 3 June 1997. PNAC's inception, formed by people known as 'neo-conservatives,'³ was primarily focused on an arms build-up "for the preservation of peace (sic)" (p. 7), following a "decade of defense neglect." (p. 16).

REBUILDING AMERICA'S DEFENSES

Within the PNAC website is a statement (2000) called Rebuilding America's Defenses (pdf)
This document is based upon Vice President Cheney's Defense Policy Guidance, drafted in 1992 by the Defense Department's Paul Wolfovitz and Lewis Libby.

Michale Klare writes: "This (1992) document calls for proactive U.S. military intervention to deter and prevent the rise of a contending peer (or equal) competitor, and asserts that the United States must use any and all means necessary to prevent that from happening." At the time, people were "horrified," and the document was withdrawn; it is still not available. It was later incorporated into the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (pdf)

A forthcoming book,⁴ Deadly Doctrine No 1 Strike First, subtitled Objectives and Operations of America's Neoconservative Mafia, investigates the years of effort by Paul Wolfovitz and the "neo-conservative machinations" which culminated in the publication of the 2002 National Security Strategy. The author states that it is still "the country's guiding strategic military document." The first chapter of this book can be read here

The PNAC thrust, of which Rebuilding America's Defenses is the key document, is based on this 2002 document. The signatories⁵ "participated in at least one project meeting or contributed a paper for discussion." Both Libby (now indicted) and Wolfovitz, (now receiving 'entourage' complaints at the World Bank) were founding members of PNAC as well as signatories to Rebuilding America's Defenses.

This RAD document has recently been receiving more attention. Just as I am putting up this blog, for example, Peter Phillips describes the Global Dominance Group and its connection with PNAC / Rebuilding America's Defenses.

FROM 'REBUILDING AMERICA'S DEFENSES': OPERATION IMPERIALISM

The United States, says Rebuilding America's Defenses, faces no global rival. America's "grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible." (p. 8)

"If an American peace is to be maintained, and expanded, it must have a secure foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence." (p. 16)

"To preserve American military preeminence, aggressive experimentation with new technologies, especially information technologies, is essential. The "revolution" in the American military transformation is again stressed. (p. 62)

The Enduring Mission: to "maintain military preeminence that is consistent with the requirements of a strategy of American global leadership with global missile defenses" which protect and control land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. (p. 63)

"Building an effective, robust, layered, global system of missile defenses is a prerequisite for maintaining American preeminence." (p. 66)

"The price of American preeminence is that, just as it was actively obtained, it must be actively maintained." (p. 85)

"If the United States is to maintain its preeminence – and the military revolution now underway is already an American-led revolution – the Pentagon must begin in earnest to transform U.S. military forces." (p. 86)

"The maintenance of the American peace requires that American forces be preeminent when they are called upon to face very different adversaries in the future." (p. 87)

"Global leadership is not something exercised at our leisure, when the mood strikes us or when our core national security interests are directly threatened; then it is already too late. Rather, it is a choice whether or not to maintain American military preeminence, to secure American geopolitical leadership, and to preserve the American peace." (p. 88)


2. Operation Imperialism: The Enduring Mission

Brian Bogart, in an excellent essay, wrote: "Our dilemma stems from the postwar adoption of a military-based rather than a people-based economy. This policy, authored by Wall Street's Paul Nitze, is embodied in NSC-68, a document signed by President Truman in 1950." This, says Bogart, is where America "took the wrong road." Nitze's ideas (until he recanted prior to dying) are joined at the hip with Cheney, Wolfovitz, (Darth Vader) Perle, Rumsfeld.

Bogart quotes Dwight Eisenhower, upon leaving office in January 1961:

"In the counsels of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." –

Eisenhower's farewell speech is shown in a film Why We Fight, "which examines the modern American military machine and the modern American militaristic mindset." A 'Real' video of this film can be seen here

Gore Vidal recently wrote that he had been "credited" as being the first to "heretically refer" to the United States as an empire. Aged 80, he can now be treasured for his egotism and applauded for his historical awareness. In President Jonah, he discussed, with intelligence and humour, the present Bush administration's "antipathy toward democracy."
Listen to the radio broadcast.

In case there are still some who balk at the United States being called an 'empire,' the OED's definition of empire is: "From French: imperium; from Latin: imperator. Absolute sway, supreme control; an extensive territory, especially an aggravate of many states."

The plan for America's empire is on the web. Anyone can read it. The phrases preserve and extend, as far into the future as possible, expanded, visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower, preeminence … these phrases define America's intent.

There are other documents to look through, too. Just in case some think all Americans are naïve - unaware of the results their actions - read, for example, Ralph Peter's article, Constant Conflict in the 1997 US Army War College Quarterly.

"There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive."

The pathological problem with the neoconservatives is that they are myopic - unwilling to see, or hear criticism of, what conflicts with their ambition. They do not care how many people are killed. Morality does not exist in their corporate quest.

In March 2003, George Monbiot wrote: "Those who support the coming war with Iraq refuse to see that it has anything to do with US global domination."

Ghali Hassan also expresses the thoughts of many in our world.

"The Bush Administration, its vassals and the mass media adopted the cliché of "democracy" to justify the invasion and the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. However, from the outset of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. objective was conspicuous; to destroy Iraq, install a puppet government and pillage the nation's resources."

The new 2006 Quarterly Defense Review (QDR)⁶ 20 year plan (pdf) is presently causing much web discussion. The official issues, statements, debates, and commentaries are found here or one can read the key points here

This 'QDR' document opens with the statement, "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war."

Robert Dreyfus says the new QDR is the "Bush administration's ultimate Plan for Empire," which is "generational in scope." This is not a "reassessment," nor an "admission that the US has started something it cannot finish," as suggested by Simon Tisdall in 7 February's Guardian.

The PNAC document states very clearly, p. 8, "America's "grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible." Mr. Rumsfeld has simply found a new jingo-phrase, in true corporate fashion. The "new goals" are discussed in Rebuilding America's Defenses in various places. The word "transformation" is frequently used, for which the need for more money⁷ is strongly emphasized.

Picking up on the word "long," a reporter asked if Iraq would be a "long war" at the press conference, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "No I don't think Iraq will be a long war." Brigadier General Kimmitt talked about "reposturing" (not in OED) forces, and said the US would "not maintain any long term bases in Iraq."⁸

In January '06, President Carter said: "What I believe is that there are people in Washington now, some of our top leaders, who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they're looking for ten, 20, 50 years in the future."

We must insist on the US Government's definition of "long" in each instance.

Sohbet Karbuz asks: United States Department of Defense … or Empire of Defense? He gives 5 essential US Department of Defense facts.
Fact 1: The US DoD is one of the world's largest landlords
Fact 2: If the DoD were a country it would be 17th in the world's GDP ranking.
Fact 3: The US DoD is the largest oil consumer in the US, and 31st largest in the world.
Fact 4: American GI is the most energy-consuming soldier ever seen on the field of war
Fact 5: The US military is the biggest purchaser of oil in the world.
Dr. Karbuz asked me to add Fact 6: The Department of Defense is the world's largest employer, (p. 75) directly employing more than three million people. He gives an excellent list of footnote references. The article is a 'MUST READ,' here

Q. How 'long' will it take to dismantle the present Bush administration's empire? Will there be a viable future?

APPENDIX: SIGNATORIES^9< TO REBUILDING AMERICA'S DEFENSES

Roger Barnett, U.S. Naval War College
Alvin Bernstein, National Defense University
Stephen Cambone¹⁰, National Defense University, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence
Eliot Cohen, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Devon Gaffney, Cross Donors' Forum for International Affairs Thomas Donnelly, Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute
David Epstein, Office of Secretary of Defense, Net Assessment
David Fautua, Lt. Col., U.S. Army
Dan Goure, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Donald Kagan, Yale University
Fred Kagan, U. S. Military Academy at West Point
Robert Kagan,¹¹ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Washington Post writer
Robert Killebrew, Col., USA (Ret.)
William Kristol, The Weekly Standard
Mark Lagon, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
James Lasswell, GAMA Corporation I.
Lewis Libby, Dechert Price & Rhoads, Assistant to the President
Robert Martinage, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment Phil Meilinger, U.S. Naval War College
Mackubin Owens, U.S. Naval War College,
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Steve Rosen, Harvard University, ex-Director of Foreign Policy Issues, awaiting trial
Gary Schmitt, Project for the New American Century, board of directors, U.S. Committee on NATO, author
Abram Shulsky, The RAND Corporation
Michael Vickers, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment Barry Watts, former director of Northrop Grumman Corporation, author of The Military Use of Space: A Diagnostic Assessment
Paul Wolfowitz, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, now World Bank President
Dov Zakheim, System Planning Corporation, left DoD 2004

Footnotes
[1] See William Rivers Pitt, The Project for the New American Century
[2] Italics throughout are mine unless otherwise noted
[3] For a list of 50 people described as 'neoconservatives', see here. Numbers vary from 320 (Bogart) – 400 (Phillips)
[4] Books: Imperial Designs by Gary Dorrien is a recommended book. Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann, who is, I believe, a member of the PNAC clan.
[5] See Appendix
[6] Earlier QDR reports can be seen at: 1997, 2001 and 2005.
[7] To be discussed in a later PNAC blog.
[8] See upcoming Part II, US Enduring Special Interests
[9] For further details on signatories, search name at http://www.sourcewatch.org/ and at http://www.wikipedia.org/
[10] See The Secret World of Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's Sorcerer, by Jeffrey St. Clair, an excerpt from his new book, Grand Theft Pentagon
[11] Author of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, from, which comes the famous quote: "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less." His wife is Victoria Nuland, the present US deputy chief of mission to NATO.


Why the United States "extends" and "expands" will be discussed in Part II: PNAC: REBUILDING AMERICAS DEFENSES. "Special Interests."

The URL to PNAC: Rebuilding America's Defenses, Part I is
http://indexresearch.blogspot.com/2006/02/pnac-rebuilding-americas-defenses.html

Sarah Meyer: http://indexresearch.blogspot.com
can be reached at: sarahmeyer@freedom255.com